Miki Dora

Dora was born in Budapest, Hungary and moved to California as a child. His parents divorced when he was 6 years old.^[3] Dora stayed with his mother, Ramona Stancliff Dora Chapin, but was mostly raised by his grandmother, with whom he lived well into his 20s.^[4]

He was introduced to surfing by his father, Miklos, in the late 1930s.^[5] His stepfather Gard Chapin was also a "surf pioneer . . . a roughneck rebel who never fit into polite society."^[2] Chapin's obsessions with surfboard design brought Dora into contact with California industrial designers including visits to the studio of Charles and Ray Eames.^[2] Dora called himself Mickey Chapin sometimes, a name that gave him a rare status in surfing - it made him second generation.^[6]

In 1958, Dora acted as stunt double for actor James Darren in the surf themed movie Gidget.^[6]

Dora's signature surfboard, released in 1966, became the biggest selling surfboard in history, and again on its re-release 25 years later.^[2] The visibility of surfers such as Dora as well as the impact of the book Gidget meant many new surfers were starting to surf and thus crowding out existing surfers such as Dora. This sudden influx of surfers caused Dora to decry the masses both in person and in advertisements for his surfboards, one of which features Dora being crucified on two of his boards.^[2]

He decided to leave the U.S. in 1974 and lived around the world spending a majority of his time in France and, in the '80s, South Africa.^[7][8] After he returned to the US from France in 1981, he was subsequently arrested by the FBI for violating his parole by leaving the country in 1975 after pleading guilty to writing a bad check for the purchase of ski equipment. While serving time for that, he was sentenced to six months in federal prison after a Denver grand jury indicted him for credit card fraud in 1982.^[1]

Despite his perceived mistrust towards the commercialization of surfing, Dora did enter into a profit sharing arrangement with Greg Noll to release a limited number of Miki Dora "da cat" surfboards, during which time he created magazine advertisements promoting the boards.^[9]

Dora was known to paint a swastika on his surfboards^[10] and author David Rensin who wrote Dora's biography,^[11] surfboard designer Dale Velzy, and surf champion Nat Young^[12] all describe his views as racist and anti-semitic.^[13]

He died at his father's home in Montecito, California, on January 3, 2002, at age 67 from pancreatic cancer.

"... If you took James Dean's cool, Muhammad Ali's poetics, Harry Houdini's slipperiness, James Bond's jet-setting, George Carlin's irony and Kwai Chang Caine's Zen, and rolled them into one man with a longboard under his arm, you'd come up with something like Miki Dora, surfing's mythical antihero, otherwise known as the Black Knight of Malibu."

— surfer and author Jamie Brisick, in a retrospective on Dora.^[14]

Feature Films

• In 2010,the band Sol Driven Train released their song "Miki Dora" featured on their album Believe.
• In 2011 a fictionalized poetic homage was made to Miki Dora played by Paulo Carvalho “The Story of Miki Dora“. Written by Danny Camp and performed by Paulo Carvalho (kid Rio)
• In 2013, Leroy Fail recorded the song "Dora Lives".^[15]
• In 2014, Anderson .Paak included the track "Miki Doralude" on his album Venice. The track is an audio clip of Miki Dora talking taken from the 1990 documentary film Surfers: The Movie.
• In 2018, Amen Dunes named a song "Miki Dora" on their album Freedom.^[16]
• In 2023 Pushkin Industries published season 3 of their podcast Lost Hills, titled "the Dark Prince" which follows the story of Miki Dora. ^[17]

• Miki Dora at IMDb
• MikiDora.com as preserved by Archive.org. The website changed over the years, and was active from 2003 to 2018 (although it existed in a less than barebones state previous to that).